Name: Pakistan to resume polio vaccination campaign months after it was halted by coronavirus
Brand: telegraph.co.uk
SKU: telegraph-co-uk-147
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Pakistan to resume polio vaccination campaign months after it was halted by coronavirus

preview

The campaign to stamp out polio in one of its last haunts will begin again next week, four months after it was halted due to the coronavirus.Eradication efforts will resume in Pakistan as health officials worry the pause in operations meant .Pakistan will begin targeted vaccination campaigns from July 20, building to nationwide sweeps from September onwards. Districts included in the first round are Faisalabad, Attock, South Waziristan, and parts of Karachi and Quetta, with a target to vaccinate almost 800,000 children under the age of five.Afghanistan will also begin its own vaccinations soon, sources said.Vaccinations were halted in Pakistan for fear door-to-door teams would spread Covid-19 on their rounds. Health staff were switched from tackling the crippling poliovirus, to tackling the new illness.The hiatus meant the country , and “heightened risks across Pakistan”, a statement said.The pause in Pakistan came after a torrid 2019 in which cases of both the wild virus and .Wild virus cases rose to 147 last year, putting intense pressure on Pakistan to overhaul its efforts which were failing to overcome public suspicion and were riven with political faction-fighting. Promising attempts to get eradication back on track then ran into the coronavirus pandemic.In Afghanistan, the disruption came as violence and a Taliban edict banning polio workers had already prevented hundreds of thousands of children from receiving drops.“The impact of Covid-19 on our economy and communities is unprecedented,” said Dr Zafar Mirza, special assistant on health to Pakistan's prime minister, Imran Khan.“With the disruption of essential immunisation services due to the Covid-19 pandemic, children are continuously at a higher risk of contracting polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases.”The three-decade long worldwide polio eradication effort has cut the annual toll of the virus from around 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 33 in 2018.Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two remaining countries harbouring cases of the wild poliovirus. Yet while global health officials are confident the scourge can be beaten, the “last mile” to eradication has proven stubbornly hard.Protect yourself and your family by learning more about&nbsp;Related TopicsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

The campaign to stamp out polio in one of its last haunts will begin again next week, four months after it was halted due to the coronavirus.Eradication efforts will resume in Pakistan as health officials worry the pause in operations meant .Pakistan will begin targeted vaccination campaigns from July 20, building to nationwide sweeps from September onwards. Districts included in the first round are Faisalabad, Attock, South Waziristan, and parts of Karachi and Quetta, with a target to vaccinate almost 800,000 children under the age of five.Afghanistan will also begin its own vaccinations...

public

By Ben Farmer

Ben Farmer

Think ahead with the latest news, comment, analysis and video. Subscribe here: https://telegraph.co.uk/customer/subscribe

telegraph.co.uk

Credible

Speculation

Anecdotal Evidence

Generalization

Stacking the Deck

Appeal to Authority

Straw Man

Slippery Slope

Emotional Appeal

Red Herring

False Dilemma

Illogical

Moral Equivalency

Ad Hominem

Correlation w/o Causation

Semantics

Begging the Question

Faulty Analogy

Non Sequitur

Bandwagon

Dogmatism

Failing Occam's Razor

Biased

Pure Opinion

Hit Piece

Racial Bias

National Bias

Religious Bias

Financial Incentive

Political Agenda

Gender Bias

Misused Image/Video

Study Misinterpreted

Mistake

Misused Term

Science Misrepresented

Factual Error

Satire

Surface Level

Lack of Reliable Sources

Sensational

Not Credible

Investigative

Balanced

Well Sourced

Great Context

sports

entertainment

U.S.

international

business

technology

science

culture

politics

media

health

Pakistan to resume polio vaccination campaign months after it was halted by coronavirus

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS